Excerpt from The Principles of Morals (Being the Body of the Work), Vol. 2 It may excite some surprise that I have made so few allusions to the numerous, and, in some cases, valuable, works on Ethics which have appeared in England during the last few years. It is not that I am blind to their merits, or that I have not derived advantage from them in the way of either confirming, modifying, or correcting my own opinions; but the result of my experience is that the constant reference to other authors is a source of considerable difficulty and embarrassment to the reader. Many writers do not seem sufficiently to discriminate between the functions of an author and a reviewer; and this is especially the case in philosophical works, where the large proportion of contested matter offers a con stant temptation to an author to digress into a discussion of other theories, either as coinciding with or conflicting with his own. To so great an extent is this the case that I often find persons who have great difficulty in distinguishing between the expository and the critical parts of a modern book. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.